Airlines have sought to provide more services during flights to entice customers to choose their product in a competitive market. From entertainment to culinary offerings, the airlines are continuously seeking new and better ways to service their passengers in all aspects of the industry. In particular, the food and beverage service is a significant consideration in the design and layout of the aircraft. One aspect of current emphasis is the beverage service, and how to get the beverages to the passengers without disrupting the passengers while providing a manageable and maneuverable mode of distributing the drinks.
In order to provide a catering service to passengers aboard short, medium and long range flights a food and beverage area, or “galley,” is used to store food and beverages, and also house mobile catering carts. These carts perform a number of functions related to the delivery, storage and distribution of either cold or combined hot and cold meals and beverages on the aircraft. One common industry practice is to store meals in coolers within the galley to ensure that they are fit for consumption by the passengers throughout the flight. This is especially true if the is route is classed as “long haul” i.e. taking several hours. If a portion of the meals require heating, the trays are placed in a dry or steam oven just prior to service to the customer.
To place the meals in the galley oven, they are commonly stacked in a shelved metallic open ended box known as a “meal carrier.” To place the meals in the meal carrier they have to be loaded individually from the galley carts, or in some cases from additional storage that is provided in meal boxes (also known as standard units or SUs).
For long haul flights, the chilling of the compartment that house the meal boxes may required for food safety reasons, especially where the service includes more than one cooked meal during the flight. This chilling of the meal boxes is commonly known as “compartment” or “above work deck” (AWD) chilling. Alternatively, another practice is to store the meals in conventional service carts below the level of the work deck, also known as “cart bay” or “below work deck” (BWD) chilling. In this case, the meals are individually taken out of their carrier and placed in the oven to cook, whereupon they are taken back out of the oven individually and replaced in the cart.
To distribute the hot food to the passengers, a common practice is to load the heated meals into a temporary container that is placed on top of the cart along with hot water and coffee containers. During meal service, the hot food is combined with the balance of the meal, usually stored in the serving cart on plastic meal trays. To store sufficient food for large PAX capacity aircraft there can be a substantial number of service carts required, and the unladen weight of these carts can add significantly to the operational weight of the aircraft. There is a need for a more practical, light weight solution to this problem.
Moreover, as part of the flight operation of an aircraft the crew cabin may be required to perform a number of functions in the course of their duties. These can range from conventional meal service to duty free sales and trash collection. In an emergency situation where a galley chilling system has failed, it is common practice to provide temporary chilling for an individual cart by loading a block of dry ice in the cart, where the dry ice keeps the contents of the cart cool. What is needed is a multi-purpose cart that is suited to accommodate all of these various functions and be lightweight and maneuverable within the aircraft.